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Michael Gonzalez at Solo Projects
Art in America, Jan, 2007 by Michael Duncan
Missing in action locally for the past six years, Los Angeles artist Michael Gonzalez returned with a surprising installation of 96 small sculptures made from tubular electrical grounding braid, a material used in industry and aircraft. Exhibited as a single work titled Exographilia (2006), a made-up word indicating an obsession with exterior form, the installation, laid out on a 10-by-6-foot wooden table, consisted of a grid of sculptures of various shapes ranging from 1 to 4 inches high. Chiefly known for his inventive 1990s collage works using cutout dots from Wonder Bread packaging, Gonzalez exhibited a group of sculptures made from the grounding braid at New York's Team gallery in 2000. His new work takes this odd medium into a more intimate and multifaceted realm.
Like netsuke, the tiny new works assume a wide variety of shapes and forms. Although abstract, many loosely resemble animal bodies: a turtle withdrawn into its shell, a stolid butterfly, a streamlined anteater, an ostrich with its head to the ground, snails in various yogic postures. Others seem inspired by earlier artworks: a folded cup shape that looks like a Hannah Wilke chewing-gum sculpture; a leaf-frond form that evokes works by Ana Mendieta; a biomorph whose shape recalls the ceramic blobs of Ken Price.
The flexibility of the tightly knit braid allows Gonzalez to create complex, interlaced forms. Like doodles, the sculptures have elaborate details that function as flourishes or ornaments. Concave mouths, rounded tentacles and stubby legs endow the little Arplike creatures with a kind of comic sensuality. Like erotic fetishes, they emulate primal organic forms. Collectively, the sculptures function almost like a set of playful drawings, delineating the formal possibilities of Gonzalez's chosen medium. Just as his early collages seemed to draw out a startling number of ideas from the Wonder Bread dots, his sculptures wring a remarkable range of formal possibilities from the metallic braid. In a satirical written statement, Gonzalez confessed that the sculptures resemble small works he made while attending Cal Arts, which he felt compelled to "smuggle past the all-seeing eyes of Michael Asher." it's taken Gonzalez a couple of decades, but it's good to see him get over those tired art-school restrictions and let his inventive formal flag fly.
COPYRIGHT 2007 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
